August 20, 2016

Last night, when I took the dogs for their bedtime walk, I encountered a man exiting the fenced-in dog run. He was holding one Yorkie and looking for the other. He had a flashlight, and I walked with him back to his rig as he searched for the dog. Fortunately, the missing Yorkie was under his truck. The event caused me to dream about tiny dogs walking alone in the street. My dogs are not car proof, and our proximity to the 45 mph service road which separates us from the 80 mph I-80, makes me anxious. I always walk them with the leash loop over my wrist, but in traffic situations I take two turns of the leash in my hand to keep them heeled. No harm came to the tiny dogs in my dreams.

​Around nine this morning I turned on the kitchen faucet and no water flowed. I went outside and switched on BOB’s pump and the water flowed, so BOB wasn’t the source of the problem. I went back outside and switched off BOB’s pump. I disconnected the hose from the site source and turned the faucet on: nothing. The woman in the Class A to my left said the water was off until ten. Really? Interesting. She agreed with me that this place is a little odd. Yesterday, I did three loads of laundry - two on hot and one on warm. All three machines filled with cold water. I went to the office to inquire about the hot water. The attendant said there are three hot water heaters and perhaps the one serving the washers was depleted. Being a contrarian, I said, "Or, the hot water for the washers has been turned off." She apologized to me and walked away. She should have offered to compensate me for the three loads but she didn't. This is the least service-oriented place in which I have stayed. There is neither general (message board) nor specific (call) communication from the office regarding anything. My neighbor went to the office to inquire about the water. Guests have to inquire whether they have mail or packages.

I thought about walking into town (Kimball Junction) to go bike shopping but I couldn’t bear repeating the brutality of the I-80 traffic whizzing by me as I walked on the bike path. Instead, I took the dogs for a walk on the upper level. There's a section for Class As which overlooks the middle and lower levels. One of the spaces was empty to I walked through it to look over the ledge. There's a stream which runs by the tent section and a bridge over it, so I took the dogs down there. A little girl was trying to net minnows in the stream while her father and brother were packing up their tent. A pair of fenced Italian Greyhounds barked at my dogs when we walked by them. Their mother came out to explain to me that they bark because they're afraid of other dogs having been attacked by a larger dog when they were younger. "That's too bad." I said. My dogs bark at other dogs because they're assholes.

During a phone conversation a few days ago, Jean and I both realized that my stay in Park City has made me feel trapped in a way I haven't felt thus far. Three nights each in North Fork and Arco felt somewhat isolating, but I had Happy Hour in North Fork and I could have walked to town (on sidewalks) in Arco had I felt moved to do so. Regardless, my expectations of each place was low, unlike here. Avoiding disappointment is about managing expectations. My desire to get a bike is in part fueled by a desire to flee at a speed greater than I can walk. Biking alongside traffic doesn't ruin the experience for me, since usually I'm in traffic and not on a bike path. Walking, to me, is supposed to be a quiet and bucolic experience, save walking to work in a city. I need exercise but I'm a big believer that it shouldn't be unpleasant (because if it is I will quit). As I returned to BOB with the dogs it occurred to me that I could just leave now and dry camp somewhere between here and Steamboat Springs. Oddly, as opposed to my Mt. Rainier experience, I have too much water in my fresh tank right now, so I dismissed the thought. There is nothing wrong with a lackadaisical day in Park City (well, Kimball Junction).

I just read Olga Khazan's article "Why Hyper-Masculine Men Are Scary, but Not Fish-Like Men" in today's online issue of The Atlantic. Clearly, Caster Semenya is an hermaphrodite. Why doesn't someone just admit that? She has internal testes and no ovaries. Her parents probably had her crank cut off and called the stump a clit. What were they thinking? Oh, if we make her a girl she may be an Olympic athlete someday! On the hormone scale she reads male with three times the level of testosterone a normal female would have. To look at her, she reads male: she makes the Cold War East German female Olympians look like supermodels. (Yes, I know that I am being mean to say that.) It must be difficult to be a parent of an hermaphrodite and have to choose the sex of your child via surgery. That process only makes the child appear to be of one sex through examination of the genitalia: it doesn't necessarily make the child one sex hormonally. Even if you remove her internal testes, Semenya becomes neuter with female genitalia. Since she is both male and female, isn't it unfair for her to compete against people who are only female? Men have bigger hearts, bigger lungs and more red blood vessels than women, all of which can create an athletic advantage per se. Clearly, the next conflict regarding competitive athletes will come through a gender reassigned man seeking to compete against women.

I have a huge problem with gender reassignment surgery. I think that just because surgeons can do some things doesn't mean they should. While I have empathy for the people who identify with the sex opposite their genitalia and reproductive system, altering those parts doesn't really make the transformation complete. There are experiences in childhood, puberty and young adulthood which are unique to each sex. A biological boy who feels like a girl doesn't menstruate, doesn't have to guard his virginity, doesn't have to worry about getting pregnant, and doesn't have to worry about being assaulted or raped. His subsequent conversion to "female" cannot incorporate the totality of the biological, psychological and social experiences of being born a girl and growing up as one. The result of the surgical alteration is a transformation to become a biological, psychological and social "hermaphrodite," i.e. both sexes and neither.

A further comment to Khazan: Michael Phelps' height, wingspan and floppy feet might be genetically anomalous and give him advantages over other men, but he is a man competing against men. All of the Olympic Games are competitions among same-sex athletes: they are neither gender-neutral nor gender-ambiguous events. If Mr. Phelps' genitalia were removed and he presented himself in a racer back one-piece, I think even Katie Ledecky would cry foul.

Now, transvestites make me laugh! Whether they are spoofs like Dame Edna, the lads from Monty Python, Eddie Izzard, my business school roommate in a Laura Ashley dress on Hallowe'en, or real drag queens, they are endlessly entertaining. Guys who cut off their cranks: not so much.